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A Collaborative Read Aloud: Magic Windows/Ventanas Mágicas

By Carmen M. Martínez-Roldán, Teachers College, New York

Reading Time: Magic Windows/Ventanas Mágicas (1999) by Carmen Lomas Garza

In this entry I share a vignette of a bilingual pre-service teacher’s and a second-grade bilingual student’s engagement with Garza’s book Magic Windows/Ventanas Mágicas during a read aloud in an after-school program. During reading time, some teacher candidates, such as Diana, observed that when the books they had chosen for the children seemed too long, it helped facilitate the discussion of the book and the entire reading event, in general, when the teacher candidate and the child took turns reading, thus distributing the role of reading between the two. Continue reading

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Hurricane Dancers: The Power of the Read Aloud

By Prof. Carmen M. Martínez-Roldán & Elizabeth Morphis, Teachers College, New York.

In this week’s blog, Elizabeth Morphis, a university student taking my Latino literature course, conducted a read aloud of the book Hurricane Dancers by Margarita Engle with six fifth grade students at a New York City public school. Here she shares some highlights of her experience. We hope that other teachers or readers will feel inspired to offer their thoughts regarding the use of historical fiction and of verse to reflect on the complexities of historical events.
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The Dreamer, Part IV: The Political Nature of Writing

by Carmen M. Martínez-Roldán, University of Texas, Austin

Is fire born of words? Or are words born of fire?

In this 4th and last blog about The Dreamer I invite a reflection on the political dimension of writing. In the novel, Muñoz Ryan describes three incidents that help the reader gain insights into Pablo Neruda’s view of his vocation as a writer.

When the newspaper office was set on fire, Continue reading

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Reader Response: Sketch-to-Stretch with The Dreamer

by Carmen M. Martínez-Roldán, University of Texas, Austin

Here are my graduate students’ responses to The Dreamer in sketch format. Each of these sketches is unique and they represent a range of meanings and interpretations reminding us of how we as readers bring to reading our own experiences and histories (Probst, 1990; Rosenblatt, 1976) as readers and individuals.

As it is reflected in the responses to the first two blogs and in these sketches, the Father figure in the story impacted my students’ reading in different ways. Continue reading

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Reader Response: The Dreamer Part II

by Carmen M. Martínez-Roldán, University of Texas, Austin

The DreamerThis week we aim to have an online discussion of The Dreamer. A small group of students from Teachers College participating in a course on Latino literature, will share their responses to the novel. Please, join our discussion. One of my favorite scenes was the interchange of gifts between Neftalí and an unknown child through the hole in the fence of the backyard. Continue reading

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Reader Response: The Dreamer

by Carmen M. Martínez-Roldán, University of Texas, Austin

During the month of July we want to invite readers to respond to the 2011 Pura Belpré Award winner, The Dreamer (2010), written by Pam Muñoz Ryan and illustrated by Peter Sis. Based on events of Pablo Neruda’s childhood and inspired by his poetry, Pam Muñoz created a fictionalized account that offers adolescent readers the opportunity to meet one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century: Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.

Book cover for The Dreamer Book cover for El Sonador

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Visual Journeys with Immigrant Readers

by Carmen M. Martínez-Roldán, University of Texas, Austin, TX

Book cover for The ArrivalThe IBBY Congress offered multiple opportunities for learning about the reading experiences offered to children in different parts of the world. One of those experiences that was the focus of lively discussions involved children reading wordless texts in the project, “Visual journeys: Understanding immigrant children’s responses to the visual image in contemporary picture books.” Dr. Evelyn Arizpe, from the University of Glasgow, coordinator of the project, Dr Cecilia Silva-Díaz and Brenda Bellorín, from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, and myself from The University of Texas at Austin, shared the power of the visual image in the graphic novel The Arrival by Shaun Tan (2006) with linguistically different audiences in two workshops. We engaged the participants in reading and responding to the images of The Arrival and shared what we have learned about children’s responses to the text.
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Living Between Two Cultures: A Digital Literature Discussion of Return to Sender by Julia Alvarez, Part 5

By Andrea García, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY, and Carmen Martínez-Roldán, Universtiy of Texas, Austin, TX

Stories, novels, are the truth according to character… you are not talking about the truth universally, you are talking about the particular individual embodiment of different truths. — Julia Alvarez (2009, Radio interview KUER)

Whether multicultural literature is alien or exotic is not inherent in itself, but rather lies in the perception of the reader. From the perspective of marginalized ethnic groups this new category of literature is not alien or exotic at all. Instead, it represents their world, reflecting their images and voices. When it is incorporated into the curriculum, children from these groups find characters with whom to identify in the books they read in school. (Cai, 2002, p. 11)

Graffiti Board response to Return to Sender

In the last decade, much has been written about the multiple and contested meanings of multicultural literature. In particular, scholars focusing on this issue caution that different definitions of what constitutes multicultural education may impact the ways in which this type of literature is used in the classroom. Making a distinction between a pedagogical and a literary definition of multicultural literature, Cai (2002) writes that, “the pedagogical definition of multicultural literature is predicated on the goal that this category of literature is supposed to achieve: Creating a multicultural curriculum and implementing multicultural education” (p. 4). In this respect, multicultural literature has the potential to help expand the curriculum and bring a pluralistic perspective, one that is inclusive and democratic versus exclusive and hegemonic.
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Living Between Two Cultures: A Digital Literature Discussion of Return to Sender by Julia Alvarez, Part 4

By Andrea García, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY, and Carmen Martínez-Roldán, Universtiy of Texas, Austin, TX

Image of graffiti board in response to Return to Sender

In their discussion of Return to Sender, our students expressed some of their transactions with and responses to the text through the use of Graffiti Boards. In each collective graffiti created by the teacher candidates, specific reference to the letters written by Mari appears as an important element of those transactions with the story.
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Living Between Two Cultures: A Digital Literature Discussion of Return to Sender by Julia Alvarez, Part 3

By Andrea García, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY, and Carmen Martínez-Roldán, Universtiy of Texas, Austin, TX

“The girls told me about how they build altars to their relatives who have died, most especially the ones who’ve died in the last year,” Grandma is explaining. “So I asked them if they’d help me do one for Gramps. I don’t call it an altar,” Grandma quickly adds as if she might get in trouble with Reverend Hollister at church… “I call it a memory table.”
Drawing of a reader response diagram for Return to Sender
In Return to Sender, Alvarez’ storytelling weaves together the cultural practices that define her characters’ interactions with their worlds. Friendship, hard work, loss, and family ties, are all deeply shared values and experiences that influence how each individual character defines his/her role within the narrative.

Through events such as the transformation of the Mexican practice of creating “altars” into what Tyler’s Grandma defines as a “memory table,” we are reminded of the dynamic and ever-changing nature of culture (Nieto, 1999). Like González (2005) indicates, our day-to-day practices are always informed by multiple cultural systems, which in turn help us develop a hybrid and intercultural knowledge base of the world.

This week, we invite readers to consider the ways in which Mari and Tyler begin to discover and understand each other’s cultural identities by sharing and learning about their cultural practices. From sharing El Día de los Muertos to sharing star-gazing at night, Alvarez’ story is rich with cultural encounters between what is considered the majority and the minority culture in this story.
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